


Silence Between

by tielan



Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Community: satedan_grabass, Friendship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-10-20
Updated: 2011-10-20
Packaged: 2017-10-24 19:37:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,062
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/267102
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tielan/pseuds/tielan
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They don't need to fill the silence between them.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Silence Between

**Author's Note:**

  * For [neevebrody (neeve_fic)](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=neevebrody+%28neeve_fic%29).



> Written for the Satedan Grabass ficathon 2010 for neevebrody, who wanted "Sateda, kinsmanship, forced downtime."

They don't talk much as they set up camp.

Ronon skins and cleans the ground-bouncers he hunted out, while John works on clearing the area around the fire pit. The man knows his survival, even if he doesn't have to use it often.

"Bouncers are clean."

John glances up from the edge of the fire pit. "I thought I saw some of those edible tubers down near the river."

"I'll look." Ronon hangs the jointed bouncer from a tree bough, and goes to check it out. After Rodney accidentally poisoned them all a couple of years back, Teyla and Ronon screen any greens that go into their meals when they're living off the land.

They don't have to, of course. They've got supplies - water from the 'jumper, MREs in the emergency supplies. But that would defeat the purpose of getting out here, away from Atlantis, away from people.

Ronon pauses at the edge of the treeline. Overhead, the sky is a clear and deepening blue. Camp is at the edge of the forest, clear enough so the 'jumper has a space to land, enclosed enough that they have cover if they need it. They're too much the soldiers to risk being caught out in the field if the Wraith should come by chance.

A lingering twitch skitters down the side of his neck, into his shoulder, across his pec. He shakes it off and starts off down into the gully.

John's trail is easy to follow, even in the twilight. He might know how to move across desert, but when in the forest the man leaves a trail behind him that might as well be afire. Ronon keeps watch for anything that might come out at him. It's unlikely, but not impossible, and it wouldn't do to get caught out just because he thinks he's safe and isn't really.

The tubers are where John saw them, and there's just enough light left in the sky for Ronon to gather some greens. They'll cook nicely in the fat of the bouncer he skinned and add a bit of spice to the meal.

A few lengths past him, the river burbles in its course - a dark ribbon that cuts through the twilight landscape, plunging on through the broad meadows and out towards an unseen sea.

On the walk back, he looks over the shadowy strata of the land and thinks there might have been a civilisation here once, culled so long ago that nothing's left of them. Teyla would probably ponder it out loud, her eyes skimming the land for signs of once-habitation. Rodney would wonder if they left anything behind, tucked away somewhere, out of sight, waiting for him to detect it.

For a moment, he can feel them here, as though they're just behind him, Teyla's voice mild and amused, Rodney's vaguely grumpy.

Some animal rustles softly through the grass, dispelling the moment.

Ronon shakes his head at the whimsy and walks back to the camp.

John's crouching by the smoking firepit when he gets back, feeding it the dry bits of wood they gathered up for fuel. "Got them?"

"And some greens."

"The kind Teyla likes?"

"And Rodney hates."

"They're missing out."

Rodney announced that he'd rather have a canal root without anaesthetic - whatever that means. Then he said something about some guy called Archimedes and bathtubs. Or something. Ronon hadn't quite managed to keep up with the conversation, the words making sense individually, their collective context beyond him.

Somewhat to Ronon's surprise, John barely argued Rodney's decision.

Less surprising was John's reaction when Teyla expressed a wish to spend time with Torran and Kanaan. " _When_ _we return to active duty, I will see him less, and..._ "

John just nodded and didn't argue it at all. Ronon noticed he also didn't ask which 'him' Teyla meant.

Sometimes knowledge was a burden.

"Woolsey's confirmed us back on duty?" Ronon asks as he cuts the bouncer up into forequarters and hindquarters, and wraps it up in damp leaves with the tubers and vegetable greens, ready for the firepit. It'll cook in coals for the next hour before it's ready to eat.

"I guess so." John exhales as he rocks back on his heels. "You're cleared, and Teyla's passed her post-natal, so..."

It'll be good to get back out as a team again.

Silence rises around them as they set the meal in the firepit and cover it over, a comfortable absence of conversation.

Ronon knows this trip is for him. He knows John would have preferred to stay in the city, but thought Ronon wanted to get away for a while - away from the sweaty fragments of his recovery from enzyme withdrawal, away from the enclosed spaces of the city and the stares of the people around. Get out somewhere clean and fresh, without the stain of memory.

John was right.

What John doesn't know is that this 'time out' is for him, too.

Weeks of hunting for Teyla, looking for the piece missing from them all. Then a trip through time to discover the end of everything he'd known, and the long, long road back. The assault on Michael's lab, John's injury, and then the rescue.

Crisis on crisis, trouble on top of stress.

And then the uncertainty: Teyla back and safe and her son born, but maybe not part of their team any more - maybe not even part of Atlantis.

Ronon remembered when Teyla came to see him in the infirmary, jiggling Torran in her arms. He was in his right mind by that time, cognisant of who he was, where he was, what the Wraith had done to him. And Teyla brought her son into the room of a man who had threatened to killer her, and told him she would be staying in Atlantis and that she would rejoin the team.

He remembered the laughter bubbling up when she informed him that he must get better and get back on the team, or else she would be left with John and Rodney to deal with - and would probably kill them within a month. Then she would have to hide their bodies and go on the lam, leaving her son in Ronon's care.

It was, she said with that glitter of amusement in her eye, in his interest to get off the enzyme addiction and back on the team, whatever he had said or done while out of his mind.

And Ronon had felt the goad like a boot in his butt - as she had doubtless intended him to.

"Teyla's back on the team," he reminds John.

"Now she is. She wasn't sure for a while."

"She's sure now. Better now than never."

"Yeah. I guess."

While dinner cooks, they sort out the camp - who's sleeping where, gear, supplies, weapons. Ronon's query about a tent is met with raised brows. "You want one?"

Ronon shrugs. He's seen the images of camping on Earth and there's always a tent. Unless it's a group of men in the desert, then there's never a tent. "Thought you might."

"If I get scared by sleeping under the stars, I'll crawl back into the 'jumper," John says dryly, settling himself against a tree with a beer and tilting his head up to the sky and the stars, relaxing as much as either of them ever do.

Ronon stares up at the brilliant spatter of this planet's night sky as he lets the flavours of the beer run over his tongue - not sharp or fierce like Satedan beer, but not bad. It's a nice night out with a good friend. None of the little distractions that happen in the city, nothing but the silence and the darkness.

It feels too long since he was out like this.

Ronon doesn't miss the endless running, but he misses the night sky, so far from towns or villages, from cities or spaceships.

The fight against the Wraith is one thing, but sometimes he just wants open sky.

"You ever do this as a kid?"

"Once or twice. I really was a kid then, though. Seven, maybe eight. My father's business started taking off when I was ten and somehow there was never time after that. You?"

"Troops would regularly camp out on empty planets. Sometimes camping, sometimes tracking and moving." He remembers those long nights, endless running, endless calculation, keeping everyone in the troop going with everything from encouragement to threats while the stars tilted around them by degrees until the dawn came. Those long nights of training kept him alive as a Runner, long after Sateda died.

"You know, your fun still sounds like my work."

Ronon grins and takes another drink. "Your fun doesn't have a purpose."

"That's why it's fun."

They fall silent again - comfortable quiet, Ronon thinks, not the kind where you're hunting for something to say.

Something flutters through the leaf canopy above, wings whirring. John shifts. "How's the itching?"

Ronon shifts and wonders how John knew. "I'm not."

The look John gives him is the same one his mother would give him when he was a kid and lying about how many munchies he'd pilfered from the kitchens. He mitigates his lie. "I can handle it."

"It'll go away."

"Yeah." Ronon hopes he won't be left with these ghost skitters up his arms, down his legs, across his chest, in his spine. "You ever dried out before?"

It takes a moment before anything's said - long enough for Ronon to wonder if he got the term right. He thought he did, but he could be mistaken.

"No." John looks down at his beer, starts peeling off the label. "I had to watch a friend do it, though. Got shot down, made it to friendly space and punched out. 'Chute deployed but he hit hard. Broke his thigh, fractured his pelvis. Surgery, painkillers - the usual routine. It got pretty rough there." There are moments when John looks like a young man in a trick of the light. There are times when he looks every inch his years and more.

Right now, he looks old and weary, pained by the memory of his friend's ordeal brought back by the memory of Ronon's ordeal.

Silence. The weight of years and things that aren't spoken of, that aren't said.

Ronon can be silent with John. He appreciates that John can be silent with him.

But he can't be silent forever.

The scent from the cooking pit is beginning to spread through their glade, roasted meat, faintly herbed. Ronon gets up to look into the firepit. He turns the leaf-wrapped package over, the heat of the coals searing against his skin, even though he uses the tongs to handle it.

"Another beer?"

"Yeah."

He hears Sheppard rummaging around in the icebox, and after a moment, a bottle appears over his shoulder. He takes it, breaks the seal, tosses the lid into the firepit to twist and melt in the heat there. "Thanks for coming after me. In the hiveship."

John glances up from seating himself. "You knew we would come for you. And if you didn't, you should have."

At first, yeah, he'd known. Then, after the Wraith took him and broke him....he'd known. And exulted in the knowledge that they'd come to him and he'd be able to offer them up to the Wraith - exchange their lives for his miserable existence as a Wraith-worshipper.

They should have left him behind, but that's not their way.

That's not John's way.

"Thanks," is what he says.

Something small rustles softly through the undergrowth.

"You know," John says after a moment, "I wouldn't do it if you weren't worth it."

Out in the forest, a series of chirpers start their evening calls, _craaak craaak craaak_ through the still air.

"Yeah. And I'd do the same for you."

It's not a glib reply; he'd go after John if the other guy was caught or captured or trapped. He has before, and he'd do it again.

For a moment, John he looks like he wants to tell Ronon he's not worth that kind of loyalty, before he shrugs and drops his gaze. It's almost amusing, the way the man can admit that others are worth the effort he puts into them; only, turn the tables, and he shies away. "Thanks."

"You're welcome."

They settle back, and nothing more is said until dinner.


End file.
